Not losing weight? You're just cheating
/Most nutrition goals are pretty simple: to look good in a swimsuit and to be healthy. Of course, sometimes we put a short-term emphasis on #6packabs, but health is also a priority particularly in the long-term.
Achieving those goals requires optimizing two unavoidable truths in your diet:
The quantity of food (for your weight/body composition); and
The quality of food (for your health).
Most diets, therefore, focus on altering quality or quantity. Rules, like restricting certain foods or controlling what time you can eat(Intermittent Fasting), are examples of this. And even if a diet focuses on quality OR quantity only, the other is often affected. Paleo, for example, focuses on quality but by eliminating so many foods, quantity is often reduced. If your diet was full of processed foods, salty snacks, and desserts, it is going to be hard to achieve that same quantity on meats, nuts, fruits, and vegetables. Macros focuses on hitting a specific number of protein, carbohydrate, and fat grams. People may end up eating more whole foods because they get “more” food (in terms of volume) when they choose fruits and vegetables over chips.
But, no matter how strict the rules or how many restrictions a diet has, you can cheat on any diet. And this doesn’t mean lying about what you are eating (that’s just not doing the diet!) or occasional indulgences of less ideal items (that’s just being human and living life!). This means following all the rules to a “T” but still not achieving your body composition and health goals.
Since quantity isn’t restricted on Paleo, you can simply overindulge on the high-calorie items. For example, one can over-indulge on almond butter and bacon and end up eating more fat than they need. Their body composition suffers.
On macros, you can eat whatever you want to hit your gram totals. While perfection is not necessary when the diet starts to look more processed than not, it is not protective of health. And while processed foods in appropriate quantities are certainly better than overeating processed food, it is still not optimal. This is also where performance and recovery will start to suffer due to the role of micronutrients in these processes. I’ve had people tell me they’re doing “MACROS” but are not seeing results. This is why.
Regardless of what diet you follow, ask yourself. Does your food choices reflect the life/body you want to have? In the end what I’ve learned after the long years of my fat loss journey, CrossFit nutrition has it right.
